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Desktop deliverance: an overview of GNOME 2.20

The latest release of the open-source GNOME desktop environment includes a …

There's a new GNOME in town

GNOME 2.20 was officially released last week after six months of development. The new version includes strong incremental improvements that contribute to a better user experience and provide more flexibility and integration opportunities for third-party software developers.

GNOME is a collaborative open-source project that aims to provide a cohesive and versatile computing environment with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use. Developed by an international community of volunteer contributors and developers employed by a wide range of software companies, the GNOME platform offers effective computing tools and a robust foundation for a growing ecosystem of third-party software.

The environment is distributed under GNU's General Public License and Lesser General Public License, which grant users the freedom to modify, adapt, and redistribute software. GNOME also encourages user autonomy and technological self-determination by broadly supporting open standards and interoperability.

This article explores some of the new features in GNOME 2.20 and GTK 2.12. In particular, we will look at how some of the most significant changes impact the GNOME user experience, examine some of the architectural improvements that are of interest to open-source software developers, and shed some light on the GNOME development process to see how some of these features came into existence.

The GNOME desktop environment

New Appearance Preferences utility

GNOME 2.20 includes a new streamlined Appearance Preferences dialog that incorporates the Theme, Background, Font, and Interface configuration utilities into a single tabbed configuration tool. The effort to consolidate the utilities was led by developer Thomas Wood of OpenedHand.

Appearance Preferences dialog

Wood originally proposed the new combined Appearance Preferences dialog on the GNOME Control Center mailing list in April. He created a basic prototype with the Glade user interface design tool in order to illustrate his idea. "Various people have suggested an all-in-one appearance capplet might be a good idea to try and reduce our proliferation of these settings over many different windows. Unfortunately, no one has so far come up with any good mockups," wrote Wood. "So, I put together a Glade file organising our existing options into [several categories]."

Later in April, Wood explained his project in a post on the GNOME Usability mailing list, where the discussion continued. Several different approaches were tested before the current layout was finally selected. In early May, Wood revealed the current model in a blog entry, which generated a lot of positive feedback.

A lot of thought and effort was invested to ensure that the new Appearance Preferences would provide an optimal level of usability. As a result, the new dialog looks very polished and is sufficiently intuitive. The contents of the tabs are similar to the original preference dialogs, but the labels have been changed to improve consistency, and the controls are organized to use space more efficiently.

Background tab of Appearance preferences dialog

The old theme dialog displays a vertical list of themes with associated labels, but the new theme dialog displays a grid with bigger previews. The Background tab also uses a grid as well. It's a subtle improvement that contributes a lot to the overall polish and usability of the dialog. The position of the buttons for saving, deleting, and customizing themes has also been changed. In the old version of the Theme utility, these buttons run vertically down the right-hand side of the dialog. In the Theme tab of the new Appearance Preferences dialog, these buttons run horizontally below the theme grid. The detachable toolbar option on the Interface tab has also been removed; detachable toolbars were never particularly well supported, and aren't widely used in GNOME applications anyway.

After testing the new Appearance Preferences dialog, I'm convinced that the changes are an improvement. The new dialog is very easy to use and relatively conducive to extension. Some distributions are already adding their own tabs to the Appearance Preferences dialog, further reducing the dreaded scourge of "configuration utility proliferation." In Ubuntu 7.10, for instance, the Appearance Preferences dialog also includes a Desktop Effects tab that allows users to perform basic Compiz configuration.